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After Six Days of Outages, BofA Claims It Hasn't Been Hacked
Lucas123 writes "After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack."
'a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening'
Divulging is the opposite of what they're doing.
Not to the media, they are one in the same even though we may know better.
whoops, missed a bit, ill learn to RTFA more carefull next time
a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening
I don't think that word means what you think it means...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I think we should all have an accoutn wioth a 2nd back - becuase what if your primary bank is taken down technologically and you need to pay bills... all my bills are electronic I get NO paperbills at this point....
"We're not being attacked, we just are totally incompetent and can't keep our site up under normal conditions"
Bastard operator from America?
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
they should not used the lowest bid for outsourced team that redid the web page.
Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware.
Read between the commas and you will understand the OP was not saying DDoS is a form of hacking
To the media guessing someone's yahoo password (hint, it's 'password') is hacking.
Too incompetent to even know they are under attack.
I'm curious what is this new decision to charge 5$ a month? is this per person? per account? per card? to use the site?
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Is a bank run technically a physical financial "denial of service attack"?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's amazing what can be done with a tape vault, bulk eraser, and access to certain PIN numbers.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Yes, I'm glad that all the protesters on Wall Street are able to liveblog their protests of giant corporations using the latest iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads. And I think it's great that they can tweet all those photos of themselves wearing nice brand-name clothing and $400 eyewear.
It comforts me to know that hipsters haven't lost their delicious sense of irony over holding signs that claim they're part of the "99%" in between bong hits financed by mommy and daddy's trust funds.
Basically, now that congress limited the amount that banks can charge merchants to 21 cents per transaction for debit card use, the banks are looking for ways to keep their revenue. Some were charging about 44 cents per debit transaction to the merchant. So now, BofA will charge $5 per month per account for each month in which a debit card is used (except at an ATM).
they should not used the lowest bid for...
Lowest bidder = default action = "best practice"
Not saying it's right, just saying...and let's not act like every other corporation not in the media today doesn't do the exact same thing.
Traffic is traffic. 6 days, to scale-up a financial infrastructure, is actually pretty good.
Every time I have a complaint against a company, I know my best recourse is to go elsewhere. Many people think/say this, but reality is that the convenience (or in most cases the lack of inconvenience) of staying with some company goes a looong way to keep us from putting our money where our mouth is. My BofA accounts are my oldest because I was a naive 16 year old boy who didn't know anything about banking, so I went with the most convenient. Many years have passed and I have multiple credit union accounts with most of my money. The problem is, these credit unions don't have very good ATM/physical locations, especially outside of where I live. For this reason I have kept my BofA account, because there is one everywhere. FYI: Nobody, NOBODY should be using BofA savings/cd etc and thinking you're doing good with your money. They have the most abysmal APY of any bank I have ever seen. Get a credit union account, please. Their customer service is horrible, I have spent almost an hour on hold before. I have had problems with my debit card randomly being declined places, and magically working again (not a strip error or anything). I have had problems with their automatic shutoff protection flagging my accounts when I'm spending the exact same amounts of money at the exact same places I do every week, forcing me to call them and turn my accounts back on. They even bait-and-switched me on a credit card. They advertised some no maintenance fee card, I wanted a low limit card 'just in case', so I signed up for it. At the end of the year, I get charged a service fee on it. I called them up, asking why my no-fee card was charged one, and they said "details of the card can differ between the advertisement and the agreement you actually signed." So i check my the papers I signed, and sure enough, in the details there is a fee (which I skipped over because the advertisement for this exact card said otherwise, no stipulation) Shame on me for not being more careful, but a dirty trick regardless. Even through all that I have kept my old accounts for the 'convenience'. Now with the debit card fees and this recent outage, I am done. It has taken a long time, but they have tried their best to completely drive me off. So I ask all of you, stop and REALLY think if shitty service (from any company!) is worth their 'convenience'. I think if more people realy started voting with their wallets, we would stop getting abused so much by large corporations. Just take your business elsewhere.
That whole comment was completely unnecessary and false. You make it seem like all the protesters are hipsters, when they aren't. And then you go on about hipsters as if that gives the protests (which has no relation to hipsters) no value or worth.
Just because someone has a product made by Apple doesn't make them a hipster.
It makes them a general consumer. And 99% of the people who own iPads, are in that 99%, so those made up claims from hipsters that you typed, even if those were real claims, they would be true.
I don't know what position you find yourself in, but most of us are in that 99%.
And if that 1% would give over just half of that money that they will never use, all of our lives will be better off.
Why does anyone still have an account with this company? It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with. There's also thousands of credit unions.
At this point, it seems like anyone that still has an account with BofA must be a moron.
Another major bank that shall remain nameless had a four-day outage in recent years. It was due to internal problems (messed up backups, bad SQL causing corrupted database, etc.). So it can happen although 6 days is really stretching it. I have also worked for a bank and seen systems hard down for close to a day (forcing me to fly across the country) due to a hardware failure that begat a human failure that begat a second hardware failure that begat a second human failure (lost backup media). So shit can happen even without hackers.
It just so happened that the trouble started right at the end of the month, when lots of people are trying to make mortgage payments. My mortgage with BofA specifies that I have to make my payments online, I am charged a service fee if I try to walk into a banking center and pay it. Luckily I was able to get in after about 10 minutes of trying, but I wonder if they've got the stones to try and charge folks service fees if they went to the bank because they couldn't log in online...
I have to agree with you on that point. Credit unions tend to treat their customers the best (at least their low end customers, under 200K cant speak for higher income levels) I have used probably 15 different institutions over the past 20 years now, and of them all, the credit unions have always been the most helpful. I used BoA and had them do the same with the acct. freezing, but with my local credit union, i have 24/7 video teller service, 24/7 online banking, not a lot of ATMs, which it the downfall, but higher rates than all the major banks on savings, i get paid for having a checking acct, granted around .9% but most banks charge for a checking, but i digress. If you are getting screwed, take your business elsewhere, its the only way to change things.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The BofA installed some upgrades or patches (maybe both) over the weekend and had then had issues. I did a Google search on "bank of america outage upgrade" found this: http://www.wbtv.com/story/14162614/bank-of-america-website-goes-down-has Seems to make sense. Why the BofA spokesperson could not have said that more often that it was due to a upgrade problem is a bit amazing to me.
per se
I don't know.
Credit cards. Home mortgages, car loans, payments to relatives who only have accounts on it etc. BOA are assholes to small businesses that need to process checks from them. They will only process like $50 and will charge you to cash out a customers check, unless of course you have an account with BOA too ... wink wink. Citigroup I heard is doing the same thing forcing businesses to have accounts with these aweful people agaisnt their will so the banks can invest and and collect interest off of their money. Crooks
I am paying off as much debt as I can so I can give these assholes the finger. I plan to do that by the end of the month. When I lived in Alaska, most of the banking there were credit unions. They were awesome! AlaskaUSA credit union was the best union out there and I plan to move my money in one. Not all credit unions are great though so you have to shop around. Here in Florida I do not like them but any of them are better in bank of America. I would love to see them die a slow horrible death.
If corruption were not so rampant there would be laws agaisnt the rules of cashing others checks and BOA will die. Many simply are stuck and can't leave. I view my relationship with my bank as that of an abused wife. Save up for years to plan to leave and never go back. Pretty soon BOA will be shocked and dumbfounded when they have no customers left. This time hopefully a tea party president will let them die a horrible death. They do not deserve to be in business
http://saveie6.com/
Maybe if BOA realized that customers are leaving in droves because of the BS they would not have to put in these transaction fees. Smaller banks have become very popular in the past few years and BOA does mathmatical research in keeping people in debt and ripping everyone off to benefit them the most, forgetting it is a 2 way street in the marketplace. Once people pay off their BOA credit cards they will take their money elsewhere.
http://saveie6.com/
Even worse, those six days are right at the beginning of the month, when many folks pay rent, bills, etc.
That has got to suck.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Morons are far more common than you want to believe. But, as the loss of customers of BofA is in the news, it will encourage other BofA customers to leave. There's a whole lot of "me too"-ism in those moronic masses.
But yeah, I haven't banked with a typical consumer bank for a very long time. I don't see the point. If I want to punish myself, I'll hire a hooker to beat me or something. Probably cheaper that way anyway.
There ya go. I mean, it's not like BofA doesn't have plenty of PR people and that those PR people decided that denying it was a hack was the best course of action. So, what could have happened that would be worse for their image than admitting to getting hacked for 6 days?
Credit cards. Home mortgages, car loans,
None of these involve checking accounts with debit cards. And with home mortgages, you have zero control over who your lender is, but again, you won't be charged a $5/month fee for using a debit card if all you have with BofA is a home loan. You have to willingly go there and set up a checking account to get that kind of "service".
No one's forcing you to get a credit card or car loan with BofA.
payments to relatives who only have accounts on it etc
Huh? Please explain. If you need to send money to people, there's this thing called a "check" (or "cheque" for our non-American readers). You put it in an envelope and send it to the recipient. There's also money orders, cashier's checks, wire transfers, and of course Paypal. And don't forget good ol' cash. All with different fees and levels of security and convenience.
BOA are assholes to small businesses that need to process checks from them.
So why do any small businesses bother doing business with them, instead of simply going to one of the dozens or hundreds of other banks or credit unions in their locality?
They will only process like $50 and will charge you to cash out a customers check, unless of course you have an account with BOA too ... wink wink.
Huh? If your customer has a BofA account (which immediately makes their intelligence rather suspect; maybe you should look for another customer), and gives you a check from that account, it's simple: you take it to your own bank, and deposit it. Your bank will get the money transferred from BofA for no fee. Of course, this won't let you avoid alerting the IRS to any large transactions, but that's the price you pay for evading taxes.
Citigroup I heard is doing the same thing forcing businesses to have accounts with these aweful people agaisnt their will so the banks can invest and and collect interest off of their money. Crooks
Again, you're not making much sense. No bank can "force" you to have an account with them, and checks have been a no-fee way of transferring money for at least 100 years now (unless you're one of these morons that goes to a check-cashing store).
When I lived in Alaska, most of the banking there were credit unions. They were awesome! AlaskaUSA credit union was the best union out there and I plan to move my money in one. Not all credit unions are great though so you have to shop around. Here in Florida I do not like them but any of them are better in bank of America.
I live in Arizona, formerly on the east coast, and I've been using credit unions in both places since 1994. They're located pretty much everywhere to my knowledge, people just ignore them because they're smaller and a lot of people for some dumb reason think they need to always patronize the biggest corporation they can find. I did have to change accounts from one here in AZ recently, however, called AZFCU. They got too involved in the mortgage mess I suppose, and as a result of their bad decisions they had to close a lot of branches, including the ones that were convenient to me. So I moved to another CU that had better branch locations and didn't seem to be having hard times, and everything's been good with them so far.
If corruption were not so rampant there would be laws agaisnt the rules of cashing others checks and BOA will die.
What rules are you talking about? Maybe I'm really missing something here (quite possible), but I thought cashing checks was a pretty simple affair. I've cashed/deposited business checks with my personal account and never had any problems (or fees) (different banks of course).
This time hopefully a tea party president will let them die a horrible death.
A TP President would give them a giant bail-out, just like Obama. If you think the TP politicians are any different from any other politicians, you're sadly mistaken. The only difference is the rhetoric they spew; their actions are all the same.
Morons are far more common than you want to believe. But, as the loss of customers of BofA is in the news, it will encourage other BofA customers to leave. There's a whole lot of "me too"-ism in those moronic masses.
Actually, me-too-ism can be an intelligent way to act, as long as you look at why others are doing something and then copy it if it's right for you. If you see a lot of people all doing the same thing, it can be very smart to look at why they're doing it, because there might be a very good reason that you missed before: there's a big storm coming, for instance.
When you see all the animals moving to high ground, and tsunami alarms going off and all the people evacuating, and you stubbornly refuse to leave your beachfront home, then it's you who's the moron, not the masses.
They don't care because they are too big to fail.
Fascism, in MY country?
Supposed to be "lowest bidder to hit the spec". But who knows with these TBTF zombies.
Oh, it gets even worse than that... try cashing a corporate or business check drawn against a BoA account. They will happily charge *you* $6 for the privilege, unless you have an account there yourself.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
to a nicer bunch of assholes.I hate the fucking bank!! Too big to FAIL my ass, they should have let it go down in flames, same with CITI bank. This lets institute a $5.00 monthly charge to let you use your money, cause the big bad government won't let us rape the merchants anymore. We gotta screw someone and now it is our suckers er I mean customers we are gonna screw. What a great fucking idea. But hey we can still afford to hand out billions, yep billions with a B, of bonus money to the guys who drove this place into the ground, er I mean made all those smart business decisions. In the past year they have paid out over 4 billion in bonus money. The purchase of country wide mortgage and merrill lynch were gonna make us billions, at least that's what we told the shareholders. Oh and lets not forget the 35,000 people who will be members of the unemployed, cause we just have to be able to keep giving ourselves those big bonus's. Yep couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of scumbags. Maybe next time that fucking bank is on the verge of collapse the congress of baboons will just let if fail.
that's today's Bank of America. portfolio full of toilet paper, execs who aren't canning the weasels who got them into the mess they're in or reporting them to the authorities, bigwigs giving themselves fat handshakes while stiffing the public, illegally foreclosing on houses they can't prove they loaned against, and can't fix a creaky website in a week.
oh, boy, time to run out and put all my money there, ya betcha, Sven.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Didn't suck at all, in fact until this article I had no idea they were having problems. Several first of the month billpay transactions worked just fine.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I had just figured the outage was due to the massive influx of traffic of people trying to close their accounts online or simply withdrawing as much money as possible before closing through a branch. Due, of course, to their $5 fee announcement a few days ago.
Wish it would continue for months.
Per account, per month?
If not, I hope it gets worse.
At least some speculation in the media has been that some or all of BofA's system problems may be due to self-inflicted system load increase in the form of large number of online account inquiries and cancellations prompted by the debit card service fee.
Priceless.
Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware
So, instead of a victim they're announcing to the world they're incompetent. I'm not at all certain that's an improvement. It was a choice between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea anyway. One way announces their security is sub-standard, the other that they just don't give a crap, which most of their customers already suspected anyway.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
What are you talking about? Maybe I'm missing something, but hasn't it been for the last 100+ years that if you take a check (from a different bank), to your bank and deposit it in your account, there's no fee for this service? Of course, you have to wait a few days for the check to clear, and if it's a really big check your bank will notify the IRS so you better not try to hide it on your tax returns, but otherwise there shouldn't be a fee.
it's simple: you take it to your own bank, and deposit it. Your bank will get the money transferred from BofA for no fee.
You are presuming that the person holding the check written on BoA paper has a bank account.
This is the point of the argument against BoA (and the few other banks) that charge a fee for cashing their own financial instruments. The worst part of it is that the person with the BoA account generally doesnt even know that there is such a fee when they are writing their check.
The FDIC estimates that there are 10 million American households without bank accounts that are thus forced to pay a fee whenever they receive a BoA financial instrument.
Banks charging money to cash their own financial instruments is a relatively new phenomena, and the only banks that do it handle very large amounts of payroll checks. BoA in particular strategically took over regional banks across the country, one after another, that had a significant payroll business. I'm sure more than a few of us here have witnessed the bank their employer does business with get taken over by BoA.
"His name was James Damore."
Where the hell could you possibly find 7% per month guaranteed. People would put millions in that. Best I find online is 2% from a no-name place, and 1% from places like ING. Those are for savings too, not checking.
Nobody is willing to pay 7% with the central bank rate and economy as it is. If they are, then they are doing something illegal or risky (which with money in checking accounts would be illegal). To get 7% you'd need to be in corporate junk bonds, like Ca or worse. For those the historical rate of default is near 70%. Not the kind of thing you can but guaranteed money in.
One has not been able to "choose" the lender since the great depression. Banks face 2 issues. The first is that they need to be solvent. i.e. more assets then loans. The 2nd is liquidly. When banks run into problems they need to sell assets – such as your home loan. Here’s why.
I am going to use the movie “It’s a Wonder Life”. Lots of real work banking issues in that film. George Bailey, owner of a small bank, has a problem. He has a lot of short term loans (i.e. customer savings that can be withdrawn at any time) and lots of long term assets (i.e. home loans). When there is a run on the bank (customer’s withdrawal their savings) or the assets collapse (bad loans) Uncle Billy had to go the big bank and pledge his assets for cash.
This only kind of solved the issue. They have liquidity, but now they are leveraged to the hilt. Another bank run and their dead. The wise choice would be to become smaller and deleverage – but they can only do that if they can get rid of the home loans. Back then mortgages carried provisos that let the bank call in your home loan with 60 days notice. Fun!
The good news is that if your loan is sold to Vinnie the Loanshark he has to follow all of the rules in the mortgage contract and the various banking laws. Bad customer service yes – but now broken legs and no new fees.
You are presuming that the person holding the check written on BoA paper has a bank account.
OK, unless you're an illegal alien or a homeless person, why wouldn't you have a bank account?
The FDIC estimates that there are 10 million American households without bank accounts
Yes, these are probably mostly illegals; they can't get bank accounts because they don't have valid SS numbers. We have tons of them here in Phoenix, and you can tell which neighborhoods have lots of them, because they also have lots of check-cashing stores around, sometimes right across the street from each other.
How many citizens are going to be getting checks from businesses using BofA, who can't go get their own account? Credit union accounts are free (and I believe most small bank accounts are too). It's stupid not to get one if you can.
I think one commentator said that the protest crowed were the most overeducated underemployed protesters she had ever meet.
Because they were at least no worse than any of the others at the time I needed an institution to handle Direct Deposit, much better than some, had branches in the places I would be doing business (in multiple states), and they still aren't charging me personally any direct fees at all. I have never used my Debit card except as an ATM card, so I won't get this fee either.
I personally like their website (which works most of the time for me - though it is down on occasion, and it wouldn't surprise me to find it was not as reliable as some other banks). Setting up the automatic bill pay for my credit card was pretty easy, but the main reason I've stuck with them is they also have a pretty neat system called ShopSafe. It allows me to generate temporary credit card numbers for online transactions. Those numbers have user-defined caps to how much they'll allow to be charged on them, and will only work at the first site that charges them. I do most of my major purchases online, so it's a good method for managing that side of things.
Should they move into charging me fees for things I actually use, I will look into other banks, but at the moment there's no driving need for me to switch. As a temporary storage point for my money before I move it to other investments, it does the job it needs to. If someone happens to know of another bank that has a system like ShopSafe, has branches (or an appropriate alliance) across the United States, and is better, I'll be happy to take a look. Until then, I'd say my choice is reasoned and rational given the information at hand and my personal needs. If you'd like to consider that being a moron, I suppose that's your prerogative.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
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They, and several other "too big to fail" banks are literally broke, and a run on them would make that all too obvious. While some people observe that their market cap (total stock value) is less than their "book value" we must remember that they got FASB rules suspended, and are marking all the bad mortgages on their books to a fantasy that they'll all pay off, rather than the market value which reflects their real worth. Honest books would show they have negative value.
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Since they are only propped up by loans from the fed, and FDIC doesn't have the money to back up the guarantees, the government sure ain't going to say anything that would cause a bank run, except for a couple of senators that have already mentioned in session only an idiot would still have an account with any of them. Do you suppose they know things they don't tell us? Count on it -- their own stock portfolios beat the best unprivileged managers every year, and by fat margins (double digit %) -- insider trading is legal for congressmen.
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Run, don't walk, if you're in one of the TBTF banks, find a local or a credit union. You've been warned. This won't end pretty. Some of them have bad paper exposure in the trillions, and it's not on the books because the rules were changed for the emergency. The bad stuff is still there....
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
...or people could rush the bank and cause the very problem they sought to avoid.
OK, unless you're an illegal alien or a homeless person, why wouldn't you have a bank account?
Many people are poor and cannot maintain a balance, and as such must pay a monthly fee to have a bank account.. which they cannot afford to do, so they don't have bank accounts.
Yes, these are probably mostly illegals; they can't get bank accounts because they don't have valid SS numbers.
There is a reason that the check cashing business is so huge in inner cities, and its not because of all the Mexicans and Cubans in places like Boston, New Haven, and New York.
You are ignorant and lacking of even a small amount of common sense.
"His name was James Damore."
that would be even scarier. Six days of spotty service for no good reason?
They have a reason. Its not a good one. I'm not aware of any GOOD reason for a 6 day outage.
Their reason according to the Wall Street Journal article is a botched upgrade.
Someone in IT is having a very bad week.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Some place that provides, well, data, like say Bankrate:
http://www.bankrate.com/rates/safe-sound/memorandums-memos.aspx?fedid=480228
They seem to feel B of A is sound these days. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm not panicking because someone else is saying "The world is ending!"
...if you take a check (from a different bank), to your bank and deposit it in your account, there's no fee for this service?
That doesn't fit the definition of "cashing".
The real issue is traffic, the article leads me to believe that the back end data is getting crushed by old records which don't usually get instantiated. They try to downplay it, but the real problem is the mass exodus. I bet the many old customers are going back though old statements and printing them in advance of a transfer. I've developed statements systems for another bank, they don't behave well when too many people rip through all of their old statements at once. There usually are even firewalls that might have capacity issues.
I can understand why they are trying to downplay this, as herd of customers preparing to leave is an embarrassment, but my 20/20 hindsight tells me that it should have been anticipated. Maybe it was a little, but I can't imagine that IT was brought in much before they announced what I see to be a bone-headed move to get out of retail banking.
Oh, yea, to stay on topic, sometimes people make mistakes. However, it's spelling issue, but a word choice, I don't think it's wrong. Odd maybe in it's use, but not wrong. Did you even look up Divulge before you before you commented, just to check the meaning. I did.
To disclose or reveal (something private, secret, or previously unknown).
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
wouldn't surprise me
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Given the bail out that has been reciprocated by lying to mortgage holders,(dual tracking BoA calls it), and the President publicly disrespected. This apparent DDoS couldn't have happened to a better person, errrrrrrrrr corporation. I am entirely grateful that a certain pin head isn't in a government position to bail these things out; again. if Bank of America closed their doors and dissolved tomorrow, so what.
I do propose a going away party the day after Bank of America closes.
Many people are poor and cannot maintain a balance, and as such must pay a monthly fee to have a bank account.. which they cannot afford to do, so they don't have bank accounts.
You don't need to maintain a balance to have a bank account. Maybe at shitty banks like BofA you do, but any credit union will happily give you a savings account (they call it a "share account") for free, and all you have to do is keep $5 in it (which is easy, they simply don't let you withdraw it below that level). Of course, this isn't quite as useful as a checking account, but you don't have to worry about overdrafts, and there's no problem depositing checks into your share account for free.
There is a reason that the check cashing business is so huge in inner cities, and its not because of all the Mexicans and Cubans in places like Boston, New Haven, and New York.
You are ignorant and lacking of even a small amount of common sense.
So then why don't you educate me about why check-cashing is so huge in those places, smartass? Is it because all those people are too stupid to get a free account at the local credit union?
And sorry, I don't see how it's "common sense" to not understand why anyone wouldn't have a bank account in this day and age. It's not like I hang around dirt-poor people all the time. Heck, I grew up in a rather poor family, and even so, we always had a bank account; my mom took me to the bank when I was 9 or 10 years old and got me my own savings account, even though we didn't exactly have much money to put in it.
I guess the conversion off of OS/2 didn't go as well as planned.
That doesn't fit the definition of "cashing".
It's close enough. You take the check to the counter, and if you have an account there, they cash the check for you. Of course, that assumes you have enough money to cover the amount of the check already in your account; if not, you'll have to wait for the check to clear. If that's a problem for you, then demand payment in cash. If you're so broke you need the money right now to pay your bills, and this is a routine occurrence for you (like every payday), then you need to work on your money-management skills.
They are worse than broke to honest accounting practice -- they are highly negative, which they are allowed to not report due to FASB rule 137 (see wiki on that). Your belly button lint might have value, they don't. Further, they're not in the club, like Lehman. They're goin down. They are blocking customers from taking their money out - so they are telling the truth. No *external* hack is happening.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Dude you're an asshole. You haven't explained why I'm wrong, you just say that I am and call me names. Fuck you.
BOA probably doesn't care if those people leave. What value is a customer that kept a low balance in a checking account at BOA, but made numerous debit card transactions in a month? They were worth keeping for the debit card fees. Now that those fees are drastically reduced, those customers are next to worthless for BOA. If they can't kick up some revenue from those customers with a $5 fee, they will have no problems if they leave with their minimal daily balances.
This fee does not apply to balances over $5000, so those people will most likely not move. Part of their "mathematical research in keeping people in debt and ripping everyone off" most likely includes determining if losing X customers, but making Y additional fee dollars is justified.
Depends on whether you'd classify millions of depositors (attempting) withdrawing their funds simultaneously as a good reason or not.
May the Maths Be with you!
When I was getting a new furnace (several thousand dollars) I got a half dozen bids, threw out the ones that seemed abnormally high or low, then evaluated the rest. Usually the lowest bidder is low for a reason. (Although to be fair, sometimes they're just more efficient.)
Oh shit, I thought it said the BofH was hacked!
Whew! Thankfully, though, that's not the case:
http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/
It depends on how you do it. If you pwn 10,000 PCs with code you wrote and DDoS someone with your home made botnet, it is indeed a hack.
However, I doubt this is a hack. Their servers are probably overloaded from all the people logging on to cancel their accounts. Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge? Durbin was right; this isn't a DDoS, it's a Netflixing. Their CEO is incredibly out of touch (like most bankers). I hope they go out of business.
They should listen to the antitea protesters who are now protesting wall street in 50 cities. People are really pissed off; wall street ignores us at their peril.
Free Martian Whores!
So if it's not hack or DDOS is it really Accenture or SAP?
All my billpay transactions are working just fine. Now, if only I could log in to pay off the creditcard those were all billed to...
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You are crazy if you still trust your money to any american institution.
By 2012 to 2014, you will no longer be able to open an account as an american overseas (many americans have already had their accounts closed, including people just for having a US mailing address that are not us citizens), as the new laws go in to effect to penalize any bank internationally for not reporting the accounts of american citizens. Most have decided to just stop doing biz with americans.
Your options are limited however for a safe haven.
Try chile. They still have no debt, and 6 percent growth, massive resources (5 lkarest gold producer by 2015, lithium, copper, etc), small pop (mostly young with a fully funded private social security system).
Most importantly, they went through their own (real estate fueled )banking crisis of this sort in the 80's, and implemented the laws that shielded them from the financial crisis in ways that almost no other country in the world managed. like don't loan money to people without money.
Unless you have 8+ digits in your yearly income number, you are part of that 99% too.
file:
Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge?
Because you can't log in to the webserver to cancel? Perhaps the denial of service was internal and intentional.
Oh, because maybe the bank isn't offering me a service I want at a price I'm willing to pay? See cousin posts for particulars.
I see you take after your namesake. You're badly informed if you think credit union accounts are free.
Your "surmises" reveal much prejudice. I have an assumption of my own, but I'll be explict about it rather than make you think about it: how's your Tea Party member card serving you?
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
They have a reason. Its not a good one. I'm not aware of any GOOD reason for a 6 day outage.
The recent outage of Kernel.org had good reason. It was hacked, so they shut it down to re-build the systems.
I'm guessing that nobody told the web services group about the planned price increase for debit cards.
Poor people get charged 30% interest by these assholes on their credit cards. That is very long term cash that adds up in volume. Well Fargo beat BOA in the 1980s and 1990s because they focused on the lower classes and opening as many branches as possible while BOA focuses on the uber wealthy and using mathmatical algorithms to figure out how to steal as much money as possible.
I believe that is what trule makes BOA money as I heard 1 trillion in debt owed by credit cards was thrown up in the air.
True the wealthy own 80% of all the money in the US, BOA gives them terrible interest rates compared to competitors because they are just greedy and want to skim it all. My parents have over 1 million with them and they are giving them .016% interest. Come on? They are about to shop elsewhere. Many low balances do add up over time in volume especially.
http://saveie6.com/
Dude you're an asshole.
You finally got something right.
You haven't explained why I'm wrong
Yes I have. Now you are being willfully ignorant.. just as I predicted you would be.
..and no, fuck you and all the other ignorant fucks that talk about shit when they don't even have the most basic of understandings of what they are talking about.
"His name was James Damore."
In the past no. The definition of a check is you hand it to one bank and they process it by a transfer to the other from one account to another. What they are doing is saying NO, give us your money so we can gamble it or we will charge you.
If you are a customer or your company uses BOA you get a fee each time you get paid. So I work for free to pay BOA even if I am not a customer. That is rotten and thievery. These are what monopolies do.
If you want to be raped then fine but I will not put up with it. I work hard for my money and I am sorry it is not a service for someone to pay me their own money for christ sakes. Some businesses where I live charge fees if you pay with debit cards or checks for these reasons.
http://saveie6.com/
It sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about.
Checking is free and just a note to transfer x to y to different banks. It is not a fee, as it is the customers money and not the banks. I would think this is borderline illegal as the banks have to give your money back if you withdrawl it. This is a sleazy way out where if you owned a business and a customer pays, you are being punished for not being a BOA customer too.
All the banks do is spend it and gamble it away and keep the interest until you withdrawl it back. It is a way to strong arm you, and god forbid if they bought your employers payroll bank/company. Then you get dinged each paycheck for not being a BOA customer. Why are you defending this practice and claiming they are providing a service for you to get money by someone else? That doesn';t make sense
If I could leave BOA I would. Agreements and paying relatives with bank transfers is why I am stuck with them for the short term. Poor people have a hard life
http://saveie6.com/
I was hoping (initially) the outage was from the account closures in response to their debit card monthly fee, now it appears to be an attack, most likely in response to their debit card fee's.
The other option is IT incompetence at the bank, which hurts worse? Being attacked by an outside entity or having incompetent help?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
they should not used the lowest bid for...
Lowest bidder + adequate specs + adequate testing = default action = "best practice"
Not saying it's right, just saying...and let's not act like every other corporation not in the media today doesn't do the exact same thing.
TFTFY
Spending money foolishly is often worse then spending money needlessly. Put another way, spending more is no guarantee of quality. Diligence is.
Well, you have to figure what they could say...
"We've been down for a week, because ...."
1) "... because hackers took control of most of the network."
2) "... because a paramilitary group seized control of our datacenters."
3) "... because we don't want our customers retrieving the records before they leave over the $5/transaction fee"
4) "... because the IT people have been real busy fixing it. So busy in fact, that we couldn't ask one of them for clarification on if it was a hack, DoS, or gross negligence."
5) "... because ... FUCK YOU , that's why. It's our bank, you're just the customer. That'll be another $5 fee for asking. Get back in line before we charge you more."
Oddly enough, the reason I have absolutely refused to deal with BoA for several years, is because they seem to prefer the 5th option. I see they haven't changed their bad habits.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You can, you know, actually show up at the bank in person.
Free Martian Whores!
Because you can't log in to the webserver to cancel? Perhaps the denial of service was internal and intentional.
So get out of your "Command Centre" and up the stairs / Stenna lift, pop yourself in your obesity scooter, and trundle on over to the nearest branch with your personal details in hand, and pull all of your cash out of the bank there and then, in form of a Banker's Draft if you live in a less-than-safe neighbourhood. Instruct them to provide you with the details of your direct debits, then cancel all of them. Scoot on over to your local credit union or other financial institution and set up an account with your big wad of cash / Banker's Draft, and have them contact the companies to set up new DD's. If they can't, spend half an hour calling the companies yourself.
There is always a way.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
some places (UK) merchants do charge more for credit cards -surcharges are legal
in the US, some merchants offer cash discounts. (I'm one)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Mom! MOM! Cook me a hot pocket and get the sunblock! I'm going. outside.
Where did you purchase such a broad brush? I didn't know they made them that wide....
With the first link, the chain is forged.
On Tech News Today yesterday or the day before, a BoA employee in their chat room indicated it was an issue associated with end-of-quarter processing. I think it's rediculious to assume that just because a website experiences issues, it's an attack. Mine are all database issues personally.
I do security
Eh, screw it. It's only $5.
Do not reboot the web server!!!!
Didn't you get my email?
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Oh, wait, having typed that, I realize I do have an account that's online only, and they sent me a debit card. It's been in a drawer since about 30 seconds after I got it in the mail.
I pay (almost everything) by credit card, then direct transfer the monthly payment from my bank.
If there's a problem with a charge on your card, would you rather (a) dispute the charge on your credit card, withholding payment until resolved, or (b) dispute the charge and try to get the debit card company to give you money back?
Would you rather (a) hand over to the minimum-wage drone a credit card with a line into the credit card company's account, or (b) hand over a debit card with a direct line into your account?
And checks? My wife pays by check maybe a couple of things a month to people who still for some reason can't take credit card or direct payment. I can't remember the last time I wrote a check.
ATM fees? I can't remember the last time I got caught short by an unexpected cash purchase or lack of planning that I had to hit an ATM other than at my home bank.
These sorts of fees are bad in that they hit poor people who can least afford it. Too poor to have a couple of weeks pay in their checking accounts, if they have an account at all. Too poor to have a "real" credit card, so they have a debit card or use checks. I don't like the idea that BoA (and other big banks) see little value in retaining such customers unless they can gouge them for direct fees, but I can understand how their cold, hard analyses come to this conclusion.
Because the guy with a low balance got hit with overdrafts more than once a year. Think debits before credits..
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
.016? - How much money has the government printed?
Only banks and drug dealers could mark up "cut" their product by 1/5 (21 percent interest on credit cards + 75 - 150 per yr to issue a card.)
Next up:"Stagflation"
Stagflation occurs when the economy isn't growing but prices are, which is not a good situation for a country to be in. This happened to a great extent during the 1970s, when world oil prices rose dramatically, fueling sharp inflation in developed countries. For these countries, including the U.S., stagnation increased the inflationary effects. - courtesy investopedia
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
No, he hasn't. I haven't seen anything showing why poor people can't have credit union accounts, except some lame accusation that there aren't any nearby. That's clearly false, at least in my city. I see credit unions here in Phoenix all over the place, and usually not more than a couple miles from clusters of check-cashing stores.
The recent outage of Kernel.org had good reason. It was hacked, so they shut it down to re-build the systems.
1) At least they admitted they got hacked.
2) I imagine BofA either has on hand, or could very quickly get, more (in quantity) competent techs to take care of this than kernel.org has available. They also have a lot more disposable income to take care of this. (mind you, I don't really know how many people either have available for this sort of work, or how much money is available to kernel.org's maintainers for this sort of thing)
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.